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Happy Software Freedom Day, Comrade!

Free Software is good for Russia. Lowering their balance of payments, employing local programmers, creating opportunities for local service, allowing their students to see how major pieces of software work, reducing the issues of software piracy, allowing them to adopt software to their languages and culture and giving their country better security are all reasons why the Russians (as a lot of other countries) have embraced Linux.

“Comrade! Come to Moscow and talk to us about VAXes. We have
VAXes too, but the difference between your VAXes and our VAXes is
that your VAXes stay up, and our VAXes crash!” It was an
interesting email message that I received at my office in Digital
Equipment Corporation in 1997, on the eve of my first trip to the
former Soviet Union, a trip that would introduce me to a very
warm-hearted people.

Now it is September 10th, 2005 and I am close to Red
Square (yes, THAT Red Square) in Moscow, Russia. It has been eight
years since that first trip in 1997 to a “Unix Expo” in Moscow to
talk about Linux® and Free
Software, and for the past three days I was attending a LinuxWorld®
(http://www.linuxworldexpo.ru/)
event to do the same thing. Moscow and Linux have both changed a lot
over the past eight years.

It is also Software Freedom Day
(http://www.softwarefreedomday.org/)
and on this particular day I am in Netland, an Internet cafe, gaming
and training center at 5 Teatralny Proezd, handing out gratis
TheOpenCDs (www.theopencd.org).
Now I have been in Internet cafes before, but this place is really
great. A bar serving decent beers, coffee and finger food, pool
tables, large screen TVs, and banks of computers for gaming as well
as instructional rooms. It is big and roomy, on an upper floor of a
large toy store. I could live here.....

For those of you who are not familiar with it, Software Freedom
Day is a grassroots effort to acquaint people around the world with
Free Software. The CDs handed out have Free Software of some favorite
programs for Windows systems (Firefox, Thunderbird, OpenOffice, GIMP,
etc.) as well as a live CD version of Ubuntu 5.04. My contacts have
been Henrik Nilsen Omma and Matt Oquist. I want to publicly thank
them and all of the supporters of Software Freedom Day.

Russia is an interesting country. When I came to Moscow eight
years ago, Linux was already fairly strong. They had copies of the
Linux Journal, distributions of Yggdrasil and Slackware as well as
Linux workstations and support companies. Forty people came to hear
my talks about Linux.

Free Software is good for Russia. Lowering their balance of
payments, employing local programmers, creating opportunities for
local service, allowing their students to see how major pieces of
software work, reducing the issues of software piracy, allowing them
to adopt software to their languages and culture and giving their
country better security are all reasons why the Russians (as a lot of
other countries) have embraced Linux.

Over the years I have had various visits and interchanges with
Russia. As the Alpha port rolled out, the University of Moscow
bought large numbers of Alpha systems for a compilation farm, and I
became aware of the large number of programmers in Russia, mostly
concentrated in Moscow and St. Petersburg, who were doing
contributions to the free software movement.

This particular trip was very rewarding in seeing the LinuxWorld
event come to Moscow. LinuxWorld in Moscow was produced by Reed
Exhibitions, Ltd (http://www.reedexpo.com)
under license from IDG and was combined with a security conference
and a storage conference, which helped to draw non-Linux customers to
see what free software was all about. While the conference talks
were aimed more at the commercial businessperson, there were plenty
of students and developers wondering around talking to the vendors
and the vendor's technical people that were at the show. I enjoyed
talking to quite a few of them, including a group of students from
The Moscow Technical University of Communications and Informatics who
took me to their university to meet their Vice-Rector. This same
group of students had formed an organization called “OpenLabs”
(http://www.openlabs.ru/) and
are trying to spread free software to others in Russia. They have
joined me today to hand out the CDs at Netland.

The people at Reed were very nice to put me up at the Hotel
Metropol, a classic hotel right on the edge of Red Square. I can see
the Kremlin from my fifth-floor window, and there is a harpist in the
breakfast room every morning playing for the breakfast crowd.

But the exhibition was over yesterday, so today I am taking some
time to distribute a few CDs in honor of Software Freedom day (SFD) I
am wearing a bright green T-shirt with the official cities of SFD on
the back. I was too late in registering for SFD, but my friend Matt
Oquist (one of the main SFD coordinators) managed to get me three
boxes of CDs, three SFD T-shirts and a bunch of balloons which I am
hand-carrying to Brazil for a CIO/CEO/CTO conference put on by Linux
New Media/Linux Magazine, Russia for LinuxWorld and Hanoi (yes, THAT
Hanoi) for an e-government conference next week.

Interestingly enough, I had only one person come up to me this
trip and say “Isn't Free Software like Communism?”, to which I
replied, “No, it is the opposite of Communism. As a service
mechanism, Free Software allows the good service provider to make a
lot of money, and the bad service provider to go out of business.
The bad service provider can not hide behind the issue of not
allowing people to see and modify thesource code of their
applications.” The man thought about it a second, and smiled in
agreement.

I started this article by telling about an email I received from
Moscow in 1997. I received another email from the same person which
said, “Comrade, come to Moscow and talk to us about Linux, because
Linux is free, and anything that is free is good!” I remember
thinking to myself that this person had gotten the concept of “free
of cost”, and “freedom” confused. It was only years later,
after finally understanding the “freedoms” that Richard Stallman
continuously chants, that I realized my Russian friend was right, and
I had been wrong. It is only a side effect that in a lot of cases
the software can be obtained almost “gratis”...the real value is
in the freedom.